Nota bene: It seems the attack speed system got a revamp in trunk (ie. in future version 0.13).

At any rate, as melee char you should train primarily your weapon skill at first. After you reach reasonable proficiency (optimally the mindelay skill in the pre-0.13 system of speed) you can switch other things (Armour, Dodging, Traps & Doors, some Spellcasting etc.) The skill to reach depends on the weapon, but for most of the early weapons skill 14-16 is about enough. With higher level weapons (great swords, battleaxes, glaives etc.) you will want to go to 20 or more. This page lists mindelay skills for all weapons.

BTW, "show_gold_turns = true" in your rc file will enable feature where you see the time taken up by every action you do. That helps you to evaluate attack speed.

I don't recall any attack delay changes in trunk unless they're super recent. In any case, the knowledge bots will typically be more up to date and helpful than the wiki.

In any case, you can check a weapon's base delay in-game. Go to your inventory and look at the weapon; it will list it as a percentage. If it says 140%, that's the same as 14 delay.

Minimum delay is half that value rounded down or 7, whichever is less. Exception: sabers have min delay of 5. Every two levels of weapon skill reduce your delay by 1 (that is 10% or 0.1 turns). Hence the skill you want is 2*(base delay - min delay).

How is that possible? Max skill is 27, therefore, any attempt at "removing" a cutoff for mindelay will instead just put it there. And that will just screw hybrids even further, while leaving melee fighters (who always get their primary weapon skill to 27) and casters (who can get by without) unaffected.

The idea I believe is to have a curve that approaches min delay with diminishing returns. Most characters would not be sitting at min delay like they are now. I think it's problematic too, but it was just something I saw discussed on the forum, not something that's going in the game without further development.